Library Launches New Resource Discovery Tool: Scout

Scout is a new way to find and discover library resources relevant to your academic research. Beginning 30 August, Scout replaces our catalog search on the library home page as the primary tool for accessing library resources. Our catalog is not going away, but will now be incorporated into Scout, a much more powerful way to find material most useful to you across multiple information sources. Here are some particulars:

What is Scout? Scout is a tool for information discovery that indexes many resources like our catalog, databases, and digital collections together allowing one search to be executed across all of these services. Researchers will no longer have to search databases individually for content.

What material is in Scout? The USMA Library catalog, ebooks, licensed databases and digital collections like JSTOR and EBSCO, many discipline-specific databases and collections, government documents, and more.

How can Scout help me? Scout gives you a wide view over many different library resources to find the most relevant material to your search. It also will allow you to refine your search by adjusting the types of information it retrieves based on whatever criteria you want. Do you only want materials published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals since 2000? That is very easy to define. Would you like to set a saved search in the system and be notified whenever new material is added that matches your search criteria? That is also very simple to do. Scout can always be on the lookout for you.

How can I get to the library catalog? The catalog is in Scout, so you can access it through that service. The catalog itself is also still available at http://library.usma.edu.

Full documentation is available by clicking the small blue question mark just to the right of the Scout search box. More assistance is also available at the library reference desk or through your library liaison. We welcome comments and questions on Scout and how to use it to make your research both more complete and easier to do.